“Lost most AI researchers in six weeks”: reported a wave of departures in the meta

About two months ago, the founder and former CEO of Meta (Facebook) Mark Zuckerberg unveiled at a press conference significant breakthroughs in the fields of artificial intelligence, as part of the construction of the meta-wars. , Which may make it difficult for her to continue in the field.

According to a source, at least four prominent employees at Meta AI, the artificial intelligence lab set up in 2013, have left the company in recent months. Some have published dozens of academic articles in world-renowned journals, and have been responsible for significant breakthroughs that have helped improve the performance of the company’s social networks, Facebook and Instagram.

Although the report states that four employees have left, sources told CNBC that more employees plan to leave in the coming weeks. Karl Herman, who previously worked at DeepMind competing with Meta AI, the real departure book is closer to six and recorded an alarming number of departures at Meta’s artificial intelligence lab in London: “The Meta London office just collapsed and they lost most of their researchers within six weeks” .

According to various sources, there is no single main reason for the employees leaving, some left, for example, for self-promotion reasons and some preferred to work in a start-up.

One of the leavers is Adorad Grafenstadt, a researcher who led the development of the company’s AI capabilities and left two months ago. Alongside him, Heinrich Kotler, one of Meta AI’s research engineering executives, has also left in recent weeks to join a startup called Inflection AI, founded by billionaire DeepMind founder Reid Hoffman. According to the report, Ahmad Birami, who was a meta-research scientist, also left Google for a parallel position. Another employee who has left is Dow Kila, who resigned in December 2021 from his position as a researcher and went on to become head of research at startup AI called Hugging Face. None of the leavers responded to CNBC’s response requests.

Jan Lacon, Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist, told CNBC that people have moved on because of changing interests.